Shepherds Abiding (25 page)

“Bill Watson!”

“That’s m’ name, don’t you know.”

“You’re the best ol’ Santy ever was.”

“
I ain’t no Santy!
What makes you think such as that?”

“I have two eyes in my head, and a brain!”

He had no idea what to reply to such a statement.

In her slippers and robe, Miss Rose shuffled to the chair by the window where he sat with his cane between his knees, watching the snow top off the monument.

She leaned down and laid her head on his, and put her arms around his neck. “You’ve always been my good ol’ Santy,” she said.

He patted her bony arm with an inexpressible happiness.

“An’ always will be,” he replied. “Always will be.”

In the study of the yellow house on Wisteria Lane, an e-mail rolled into Father Tim’s mailbox.

<8 lbs 9 oz

<4 o’clock this morning.

Even on this gray, snowbound morning, the dining table in the yellow house looked festive and expectant. Sitting on a heavy linen cloth were a low vase of yellow roses and a ham platter decorated with exotic birds, which Cynthia had found in a long-ago ramble through New England. On the sideboard, the Kavanagh family silver gleamed in a shaft of early light.

Father Tim was awake, as was his wife, though they hadn’t climbed into bed until after three o’clock.

“I thought I’d never go to sleep,” said Cynthia.

“It was the excitement,” said Father Tim.

“Plus the caffeine! I drank coffee yesterday afternoon with the Methodists. Will I never learn?”

He yawned. “Wait ’til we get some Irish coffee in you.”

“Who do you think it was, Timothy?”

“Who what was?”

“The stable. Who do you think did it?”

“I don’t know. I almost don’t want to know.”

They lay together, happy and exhausted, like two spoons in a drawer.

“It’s all a miracle,” she whispered.

“Yes!” he said. “To think that you’d come to take me to lunch just after Fred carried the box with the broken angel to the alley! Truth really is stranger than fiction.”

She had her go at yawning. “I parked behind the Oxford and walked up the alley and, nosey me, looked into that box sitting on the garbage can. When I saw her lovely face, I knew at once I wanted her. I’d worked with plaster years ago, and believed I could make her whole.

“I brought it home and thought, Timothy gave Hélène his beautiful bronze angel, I want to do this for him. Because if I could do it, it would represent the very reason Christ was born. He came to put us back together, and make us whole.”

“Christmas is real,” he said. “It’s all true.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s all true.

“Merry Christmas, my love.”

“Merry Christmas, dearest.”

“By the way,” he said. “What was that noxious smell coming from your workroom?”

“Auto body putty! The perfect solution for putting together all those smashed pieces.”

She snuggled her head into the crook of his arm. “You know, Timothy—since the table is set and most of the cooking is done, and since we got to bed so late and it’s still so early, and since no one is coming until four, and since I hardly
ever
get to do it . . .”

“Spit it out, Kavanagh.”

“ . . . I’m going back to sleep!”

“Wonderful idea! And since Barnabas went out at two-thirty, and since the ham is glazed and the fire is laid and the egg nog is done and the front steps are salted, I’ll join you!”

He punched up his pillow and pulled the covers to their chins, and held his wife closer.

After all, it was Christmas.

“A
nd the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.”

Luke
2
:
40, KJV

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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